From the Romans to the Normans on the English Renaissance Stage Lisa Hopkins EARLY DRAMA, ART, AND MUSIC From the Romans to the Normans on the English Renaissance Stage EARLY DRAMA, ART, AND MUSIC Series Editors David Bevington University of Chicago Robert Clark Kansas State University Jesse Hurlbut Brigham Young University Alexandra Johnston University of Toronto Veronique B. Plesch Colby College ME Medieval Institute Publications is a program of The Medieval Institute, College of Arts and Sciences From the Romans to the Normans on the English Renaissance Stage by Lisa Hopkins Early Drama, Art, and Music MedievaL InsTITUTE PUBLICATIOns Western Michigan University Kalamazoo Copyright © 2017 by the Board of Trustees of Western Michigan University Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data are available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: 9781580442794 eISBN: 9781580442800 All rights reserved. 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Introduction N his BOOK ON Ancient Britons and the Antiquarian Imagination, IStuart Piggott notes that John Earle’s 1628 Micro-cosmographie repre- sented an antiquary as one who “likes Death the better, because it gath- ers him to his Fathers.”1 The antiquarians of whom Piggott writes were fascinated by the past and felt personally connected to it, and so too did many others in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries whose interest was more general than scholarly. In this book I discuss a number of early mod- ern English plays set more or less in the period of English (or occasionally Scottish, Irish or Welsh) history between the Romans and the Normans. The years between the withdrawal of the legions toward the end of the fourth century and the arrival of the Normans in 1066 saw both the leg- endary Arthur and the more securely historical but almost equally famous Alfred, as well as Alfred’s grandson Athelstan, not so well remembered now but a significant figure in early modern England. The fifth century onward also saw successive waves of invasions by Angles, Jutes, and Danes; at the end of this period, Britain had been transformed beyond recogni- tion, and yet a number of early modern plays which are set during this period also suggest that there was nevertheless an underlying continuity. There was a surprising number of such plays, though not all of them are now extant, which collectively constitute what Gordon McMullan has called “a larger theatrical project to interpret Elizabethan and Jacobean Britain through the reconstruction of a range of different pasts.”2 In addition to those I discuss in the course of the book, we know of lost plays on Vortigern, Mulmutius Dunwallow, Arthur, Estrild, Ferrex and Porrex, Guthlac, Hardicanute, and Earl Godwin and of one by Beaumont on Madon King of Britain (Madon being the son of Gwendoline and Locrine). Misha Teramura notes that “we find in Philip Henslowe’sDiary that the Admiral’s Men were preparing for a production of a play called ‘The Conquest of Brute’ (and perhaps its sequel) through the second half of 1598”;3 its subtitle of “with the first founding of the Bath” suggests that 2 INTRODUCTION it may also have featured King Bladud.4 Paul Whitfield White observes that “Among the many lost plays identified by title in Henslowe’sDiary are at least five that relate to King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table,”5 and Tom Rutter has also suggested that the lost Warlamchester may have been about either the martyrdom of St. Alban or the revolt of Boudica.6 There was a particular propensity for performing Latin plays about English history at English Catholic colleges abroad, including Mercia, sive Pietas Coronata at Saint-Omer and Aluredus sive Alvredus, Fatum Vortigerni and Emma Angliae regina ac Mater Hardicanuti Regis at Douai (these can be translated as Mercia, or Piety Crowned, Alured or Alvred, Vortigern’s Doom, and Emma Queen of England and Mother of King Hardicanute). In this book, I will consider a range of texts by a variety of authors which collectively present a picture of the period from the Roman to the Norman invasions, including Drayton’s Poly-Olbion, Jasper Fisher’s Fuimus Troes, Thomas Hughes’ The Misfortunes of Arthur, R. A.’s The Valiant Welshman, Dekker’s Old Fortunatus, Dekker, Ford and Rowley’s The Welsh Embassador, Fletcher’s Bonduca, Richard Harvey’s Philadelphus, or a Defence of Brutes, Samuel Daniel’s History of England, John Clapham’s History of Great Britain, Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, Macbeth, Hamlet, Titus Andronicus, and Lear, Middleton’s Hengist, King of Kent, Richard Brome’s The Queen’s Exchange, Anthony Brewer’s The Lovesick King, William Rowley’s A Shoemaker a Gentleman, Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton’s Gorboduc, William Haughton’s Grim the Collier of Croydon, Lodowick Carlell’s Arviragus and Philicia, Shirley’s St Patrick for Ireland, Henry Burnell’s Landgartha, and the anonymous Locrine, A Knack to Know a Knave, Fair Em, Guy of Warwick, The Birth of Merlin, No-body and Some-body and Edmund Ironside. Also, although I generally exclude from consideration plays written in Latin, such as Joseph Simons’ 1624 Mercia for Saint-Omer,7 I make an exception for William Drury’s 1619 Aluredus, sive Alvredus, since its 1659 translation by Robert Knightley as Alfrede, or Right Reinthron’d is in itself part of the ongoing discourse of English and British national identities, and I look also at a number of plays which though not set in the period before the Conquest did nevertheless con- tribute to the ways in which the ancestors of the English and British were conceptualized, including the The Palsgrave, or the Hector of Germany, Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany, The Seven Champions of Christendom, Henry VIII, Tamburlaine, Doctor Faustus, Dido, Queen of Carthage, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, Chettle’s Hoffman, and Dekker and Massinger’s The Virgin Martyr. INTRODUCTIOn 3 The story that plays set before the Conquest collectively tell begins with the Trojan prince Aeneas, supposedly the son of the goddess Venus. According to Virgil, Aeneas escaped from the sack of Troy carrying his elderly father on his shoulders and leading his young son Ascanius by the hand, though his wife Creusa became separated from the party and was never seen again. Aeneas had a divinely ordained destiny to make his way to Italy and there found a second Troy, but bad weather swept him onto the coast of Carthage, where Queen Dido fell in love with him and tried to persuade him to stay with her. When he eventually abandoned her, she committed suicide. Resuming his journey, Aeneas arrived safely in Italy, where he founded Rome and was eventually succeeded in its rule first by his son Ascanius and then by his grandson Silvius. Silvius’s son Brutus, however, accidentally killed his father during a hunting trip and went into exile, searching for a land where he and his followers could settle. Eventually he found a country with no existing inhabitants, established himself and his followers there, and named it after himself: Britain. In the version of events told by the influential twelfth-century writer Geoffrey of Monmouth in hisHistory of the Kings of Britain, this is where British History starts. Brutus divided the island among his three sons, Locrine, from whom England gets its alternative name of Logres, by which it is sometimes known in Arthurian myths (this is the origin of the Welsh name for England, Lloegyr), Albanact (who gave his name to Alba, later known as Scotland), and Camber, from whom Wales derives its name in its own language, Cymru. Locrine’s only daughter Sabren or Sabrina, pursued by her jealous stepmother Gwendoline, drowned herself in the River Severn (which supposedly takes its name from her) and thus became an emblem of the divisions between the constituent parts of the island. This story is told inLocrine , published in 1595 as “newly set foorth, overseene and corrected, by W. S.” and apparently a revision of an earlier play called Estrild written by the Babington conspirator Charles Tilney, executed in 1586. Geoffrey then proceeds to tell a series of racy, circumstantial, and totally unfounded stories about a number of very colorful figures who, he claims, ruled or inhabited Britain during the period before the Romans arrived. Chief among them are Bladud, the father of King Lear, who sup- posedly built the Roman baths at Bath (where a seventeenth-century statue of him can still be seen), learned to fly, and died when he crash- landed on the temple of Apollo in London; Lear himself, subject of both Shakespeare’s King Lear (1606) and the older, anonymous King Leir; and 4 INTRODUCTION his daughter Cordella, sometimes evoked as a precedent for female rule. The next prominent figure is Gorboduc, eponymous hero of a 1560s play by Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville, whose sons Ferrex and Porrex (also remembered in the anonymous Ferrex and Porrex) killed each other and so brought the direct line of Locrine to an end. After a period of civil war, rule then passes to Molmutius Dunwallo (sometimes called Dunwallo Molmutius), son of the king of Cornwall, about whom the Admiral’s Men acquired a play (now lost) in 1598.8 It was during the disputes between Molmutius Dunwallo’s sons, Brennus and Belinus, that Elidure, the cen- tral figure of the anonymous playNo-body and Some-body (1606), suppos- edly reigned three separate times; in some versions of her story Molmutius Dunwallo was also the father of St.